Wim Delvoye – Cloaca no 5

This work is a piece of shit. No, rather, it creates a piece of shit. Cloaca No 5 is a mechanized digestive system. It takes food items into one end and processes them through enzymes and acids meant to replicate the human digestive process, resulting in a simulated hunk of fecal matter. The shit is then packaged and sold on the art market as a rare edition.

Tissue Culture and Art Project – Victimless leather

If a piece of leather is created without hurting or killing an animal, is it still ethical? Is meat that is produced from tissue engineering vegetarian? The Tissue Culture and Art project sets out to raise these questions by creating simulations of meat and leather through tissue culture engineering. By deploying tissue cultures on organic scaffolding, these artists were able to create simulations of products that otherwise would require the maiming or killing of animals.

Alvin Lucier – I am Sitting in a Room

In his 1969 recording I am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier deploys an algorithmic method to generate an audio recording based on the environment it is recorded in. Lucier’s process is as follows: He records himself speaking a simple sentence (“I am sitting in a room…”). He then plays back that recording, and records the sound of playback in the very same room. He repeats this processes through several iterations, each of which amplifies the resonant frequencies of the room as they are resonated by the sound of Lucier’s voice. By the 6th or 7th iteration, the sound of Lucier’s voice is almost completely diminished, and all that is audible is a cascading raga-like harmonic, pulsing to the rhythm of his speech.